Intercession
by Tears of Mercury
Summary: Just when things can't get any worse for her, two people make it better. PeytonDerekOC sibling drabbles.


**A/N:** Okay, so over the summer I was writing a fanfiction featuring Peyton and a fictional half sister Livvie, made up by me and the writer who posted the challenge for the story. If I ever recover the chapters of that story, I may edit and post it. Anyway, this is just four drabbles about Peyton, Livvie, and Peyton's canon half brother Derek. Hope you enjoy.

Peyton turns the radio up until she can feel the floorboards shudder. A satisfied smile turns up the corners of her lips and she lets loose, dancing unstudied, graceless steps with none of the inhibition she usually has. She doesn't turn around or stop when she hears footsteps treading on the hardwood floor of her bedroom. A form only inches smaller and pounds skinnier than hers joins in, and within moments they have become a binary star, orbiting around each other in time with the beat. This is the perfect start to the afternoon. This is freedom. When she whirls around Peyton catches sight of the huge smile on her younger sister's face, takes a photograph of it with her mind. Too often Livvie is frowning at their father's latest verdict or studying a sketchpad with careful concentration. If she's lucky, Peyton will remember this moment clearly enough to draw it.

"Will you turn down the music?!" Derek yells, and they glance at each other conspiratorially. The few times a year that they see him when he's on leave he takes advantage of his recent twenty-first birthday and throws military protocol to the wind. They feel no guilt over encouraging his hangovers.

"I told you to take the damn aspirin!" Livvie yells, swinging her hips back and forth as she dance-walks her way to the stairs.

"Leave him alone," Peyton calls after her. Like Livvie and Peyton, Derek is hard on the outside but soft as a marshmallow at heart. Seeing him cranky is amusing enough, and adding insult to injury always makes her feel slightly evil. Not, of course, that that's necessarily a bad thing.

-

"Is your black mini skirt clean? I need something to wear tonight to TRIC, and I'm sick of always looking like a Hilary Duff poster next to all those clubbers and punks." Peyton stifles a laugh.

"You know your hips hate squeezing into that skirt," she reminds her.

"Just because everyone doesn't have the body of an anorexic and the appetite of a dinosaur—"

"Will someone PLEASE explain to me why you two can't keep your voices to a normal level?" In a pleasant departure from the norm, Derek isn't hungover, only irritated by all of the pointless bickering. He wonders for the five hundredth time if buying a couple of violent parakeets wouldn't have been easier than tracking down sisters who don't share his past, his ideals, or his skin color. Peyton descends the stairs and sweeps her hand over her outfit dramatically.

"What do you think big brother?"

"I think," he says, "Lucas will love it almost as much as I hate it." Yes, Derek is lucky that he has them. They are warped mirrors that show him everything he is and everything he isn't, magnified by ten. He loves them more than a badass military cadet should be capable of loving anything.

"If you think this is bad, just wait until you see what our dear little Olivia is shimmying into," Peyton says with a wide, mischievous grin. Even if he hated them, it's lucky for them that they have someone like him watching their backs. He'd hate to think what would happen if they were left to their own devices.

-

Livvie has awful taste in music. At least, that's what brother and sister dear both insist. So every time Derek is home from Bosnia or Colorado or North Korea – because home is really just the three of them together – they take five hour road trips and Peyton shoves The Shins and Sarah and Tegan down her throat while Derek slips Sage Francis and Macy Gray CDs into her beat-up denim messenger bag.

She rolls her eyes at their antics and pulls out sharpies, doodling pointless or crude pictures all over the vinyl backseat of Peyton's car. They will come off with a simple wipe of her sleeve. Nothing, after all, is permanent. As much as Livvie would like to pretend that they will always be a _them,_ it is impossible to erase the patterns history has set into place for all of them. If (when) they go down, it will be because of some serious shit like cancer or car accidents or unstable bombs going off on the job, not because of stupid arguments and grudges held too long.

That doesn't change the fact that no matter how many times her wonderful, bitchy, too-cool-for-mainstream big sister rips them down, posters of NSYNC and Natasha Bedingfield will still find their way back onto the inside of her closet door.

Derek, of course, hasn't ventured into her room since what she likes to refer to as the Always disaster of '06.

-

"It isn't fair that you have Lucas, Livvie has Mouth, and I have no one," Brooke Davis announces one day. She has barged into the house without so much as a knock; the Sawyer/Chase clan, experts at building walls, are a bit challenged when it comes to locking doors. Peyton and Livvie look up from calculus homework and rough sketches long enough to roll their eyes. "Why don't you set me up with your brother? Guys in uniform are hot," Brooke says with a wink. She's not serious. Right?

"No way are you going there. You may have been a mean whore in your last life, but I won't let you be a desperate one this time around," Livvie interjects, glaring at the brunette.

"Speaking of karma, shouldn't you trying to be working off your bitch handicap, Chase? All the frizzy blond hair in the world can't hide the snapdragon masquerading as your mouth." Peyton intercepts the moment before things get really nasty. She's good at this. And because Livvie loves her and there's no way in hell that Brooke could _really_ have an effect other than disgust on Derek, she backs off. Life is funny like that.

Just when you think every brick in your stone wall is complete, family comes along and knocks one or two of them out.


End file.
